Off the Shelf, and Out of the Box

By Lewis Dymer

Gaming is what I do. And I’m the best there is at what I do.

But enough with the blatantly obvious (and humble) Wolverine quotes. On to my first ever board game review!

Alright, now that my credentials as a full-blown geek have been more firmly established than I probably wanted, I’m hoping all eight of you that are reading this (Hi, Mom!) can jump right past the “How can we take his word for it?” questions that I’m positive are burning through your minds right now. Truthfully, though, I love board games. I am addicted to the winning, the social interaction, the strategy, and the winning (I might be a tad bit competitive)… If I could play board games every evening, I would gladly cancel my Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu accounts.

The deeper the strategy, the better. If I have to spend a week preparing myself mentally, crafting winning plan after winning plan, it’s a week well spent.
Forcing myself away from my “complex gaming” addiction, I recently bought a delightfully simple game, “Kingdomino,” and cracked it open at a local brew-pub with another gamer friend of mine. This game produced by Blue Orange Games involves zero planning, and very little action beyond “pick a tile up, put a tile down.” And it’s fantastic!

The premise is straightforward. You are a lord/lady striving to create the most valuable lands within your kingdom. There’s a pool of tiles that players choose from to build their own 5×5 kingdom. Every tile has two halves, each half with a land type on it (wheat field, mountain, lake, etc.); some tiles have crowns printed on them. Playing tiles follows a simple set of rules:

First, keep your tiles within the 5×5 grid.

Secondly, just like old-school dominoes, you must connect similar halves (in this case, land types instead of numbered dots) in order to lay a tile down.

Points are determined by taking the size of each connected land type you have and multiplying that by how many crowns you were able to fit within that land type. And like everything else in life, the player with the most points is the winner! (I credit that philosophy to my 6th grade P.E. teacher). While there are some other play mechanics involving how your tiles are chosen that I won’t get into, I assure you that every aspect of the game is very simple, and easy to learn within minutes.

By no means should you translate that to mean “boring and childish”… unless that’s the kind of games you like. Then by all means, think of it as boring and childish. Whatever it takes to convince you to play this game (I’m shameless like that). While Kingdomino does carry just an 8+ (age) rating for complexity, all that means is that this game is accessible to a wide range of players. Basically, anyone with elementary math skills can play this game.

And for those of you that cringe at the thought of getting locked into hours-long matches of Risk, Monopoly, Pandemic or the like… rejoice! A game of Kingdomino takes about 10-15 minutes to play. While this certainly isn’t a “weighty” game for an all-night game marathon, it is perfect for a friendly gathering, party game, socializing over, etc. The replayability is endless. And since it comes in a relatively small box, the portability is great!

To wrap up my rambling, there’s a reason why this unassuming little game just won the coveted “Spiel Des Jahres” award for 2017. (For those of you laughing at me, right now… yes, that’s a thing). It’s German for “Game of the Year,” and it’s the internationally recognized award for the VERY BEST GAME on the entire planet (not just in Germany) for 2017.

ALL HAIL THE KING(domino)!